4th and 5th Grade Media Lab Class Mastering Web 2.0 Tools

Gail Lovely is a education technology consultant and speaker at the FETC 2009 conference, which is one of the largest educational technology conference in the US. She has organized a list of her top 10 web 2.0 tools for students/teachers. She makes the point that Web 2.0 "It's about sharing and collaborating." And, she insisted, it's about putting the power to learn and create in the hands of the students.

The first two tools student have explored are:

1. Kerpoof.com
Kerpoof is a site that provides a variety of creative tools for animation, drawing, and movie
creation. Users can choose from a range of preset characters and environmental options, or they
can create their own. The site offers drag-and-drop simplicity coupled with advanced animation
and editing capabilities that open the platform up to a range of curricular
applications.

2. Voki.com
Voki, a text to speech generator that has a lot of very interesting applications as it works with a student created avitar which can speak text or recorded audio segments.

As students become familiar using these two tools we will be using them to enhance their current learning objectives.

6/7 Grade English Poets

Currently the poets in grades 6th & 7th are writing a series of poems related to a topic of personal interest. The poetic styles they are using are as follows:

Terza Rima: Terza rima is a type of poetry consisting of 10 or 11 syllable lines arranged in three-line 
"tercets".

Rhyme: Rhymes are types of poems which have the repetition of the same or similar sounds at the end of two or more words most often at the ends of lines.

Acrostic Poem: Acrostic Poem or Name Poem tells about the word. It uses the letters of the word for the first letter of each line.

Students are in the final revision stage and will be preparing their work for presentation on entranceway walls.

Mathematics

Hello and welcome students and parents! I hope you will find this year worthwhile and challenging in your math classes. My name is Katy Katzmann and I teach Intermediate College Algebra, Algebra II, Math 6/7, Math 4/5, and HS Technology.

In Intermediate College Algebra, we are completing Chapter I, and have a test on Wednesday, Sept 24.

In Algebra II, the students have taken their first Chapter test and will continue on with Permutations this week.

Math 6/7 has been working on rational numbers, percents-decimals-fractions, and are now fervently working on basic skill review such as finding factors, multiples, mental math multiplication, and more fractions! The students are working at their own pace, and seem to be excited to complete each skill and move on the the next. Hey, it's not a race guys! Luisana took home two extra math worksheets this week....way to go. Next week, we move on to exponents.

Math 4/5 just completed their second test with flying colors! The test covered estimation in column addition, problem solving with estimation, and subracting across zeros with regrouping. The class meets daily for 35 minutes, rather than on the block schedule. We feel that this is a better model for the 4th/5th graders because they can practice daily math.

If you have any questions, or would like extra help, please contact me.

Literature Circles kick off with The Giver

Grades 6/7 have started reading The Giver by Lois Lowry in Mr. D’s English class.

The Giver won the prestigious Newberry Medal in 1993. We are using this book to kick off Literature Circles, which we will be using throughout the year. Literature circles are an excellent tool to help improve reading comprehension, as each student is assigned a specific job during the chapter. So far we have incorporated 3 of the 4 positions which are:

1.Word Researcher-person in charge of looking up all unknown words.
2. Graphic illustrator- Person in charge of drawing the most important event in the chapter.
3. Questioner- Person in charge of developing a list of questions about the chapter.


The remaining jobs will be introduced in later chapters. In the coming weeks be sure to ask you child what position(s) they are responsible for.

Hopefully our Internet outages will be a thing of the past. Two weeks ago CANTV installed a second broadband (1500 kbs/sec) connection at the school. Our two connections now combine to make one super high-speed connection. A big thanks goes out to board member Kent Taylor who kindly brought us back a specialized router, which made this new setup possible.

Icky Worms in Swamp Goo and Crunchy Mud!

Four of the six PK and Kinder students are seen here enjoying their homemade melted gummy bear and chocolate chunk oatmeal cookies on Ms. Sherri's hammock.

We had fun creating icky worms in swamp goo and crunchy mud! They loved the green jello, chocolate pudding and crushed cookies with gelatin gummy worms/bears.

The kids did a great job mixing the cookie dough and rolling it into little balls to press onto the baking sheet. They chose their own decorations for their cookies. It was wonderful to see such little hands getting so actively involved in baking. Well done guys - it was fun and tasty!